Shopify Vs Volusion

Shopify and Volusion are powerful e-commerce platforms that share some common features but also sport some major differences. In today’s world where everyone is looking for ways to increase their customers base, to boost sales and generate profit, virtual or online cloud stores like Shopify and Volusion have set the marker for great user-friendly platforms

They are cloud-based platforms for building and managing online stores through easy-to-use site building interface.

They both allow you to manage your products efficiently, keep stock of your inventory, open individual portfolio of customers, and have custom designed templates to create your web store with.

However, the similarities end here.

For example, Shopify has one of the best templates and a very intuitive, user-friendly interface that can help you get online in no time even without any previous experience in web design. Volusion is a platform with a point-and-click interface and much more streamlined creative process.

Shopify welcomes new users with handy tooltips and logically structured design interface. It provides hints and suggestions to help newbies get familiar with the entire e-commerce concept. Conversely, Volusion comes with a mindset that users are familiar with most things concerning setting up an e-commerce store and just wants to help you get the job done, without deviating much in explanations.

Volusion was built to accommodate 16 free themes, as well as almost 60 paid templates. But it cannot compare to Shopify’s 100 free themes and even more paid ones.

Moreover, the templates of these platforms are entirely different. Shopify provides some of the slickest design solutions among all website builders. Volusion themes are functional but nothing special. However, the Volusion themes are written in CSS and HTML, which makes them easier to edit. For comparison, Shopify uses Liquid, a relatively obscure programming language, and this makes editing the backend code harder.

Shopify has a much larger customer base, with over 375,000 customers compared to Volusion’s number of 40,000 customers. Furthermore, Shopify can integrate more than 1,500 third-party apps into its system, while Volusion has merely 60.

The prices of both are relatively moderate if you consider that Shopify charges $9 for its starter plan after a 14-day free trial. Other plans are approximately $29, $79 and $299 with unlimited bandwidth. Volusion charges $15 for starters and goes further by increasing it to $35, $75, and $135 respectively.

You might want to consider the fact that Shopify charges 2% for every transaction that is not done using Shopify’s payment system, while Volusion doesn’t charge a dime.

Customers support is an area Shopify have impressed a lot of people. 24/7 service for emails, chat and phone calls is quite convenient. Volusion is restricted to phone calls from UK, US, and AUS numbers, but its customer care is very knowledgeable.

Another difference you might consider is that Shopify is search engine optimized and has a good partnership with Google Analytics and AdWords. It also has a blog where fresh content is posted regularly to keep users updated on any new changes. Volusion doesn’t have such channel of communication.

In all, I think it is fair to say Shopify has the upper hand over Volusion, but the latter has its merits too.